Spreading of a signal over multiple time/frequency resources is performed for the purpose of achieving higher diversity, reliability and robustness to interference and channel variations.
Code division multiple access (CDMA) is a multiple access technique in which data symbols are spread out over orthogonal or near-orthogonal code sequences. Conventional CDMA encoding is a two-step process in which a binary code is mapped to a quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) symbol before a spreading sequence is applied. CDMA can be considered a form of repetition of QAM symbols by using different amplitude and phases in accordance with the spreading sequence.
Conventional CDMA encoding can provide relatively high coding rates. However, new techniques/mechanisms for achieving even higher coding rates may be desirable to meet the ever-growing demands of next-generation wireless networks. Low density spreading (LDS) is a form of CDMA used for multiplexing different layers of data. LDS uses repetitions of the same symbol on layer-specific nonzero positions in time or frequency. As an example, in LDS-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) a constellation point is repeated over nonzero frequency tones of an LDS block. This sparse spreading helps reduce the decoding complexity when many (e.g., more than the spreading length) LDS signals are multiplexed together.
In sparse code multiple access (SCMA), a multidimensional codebook is used to spread data over tones without necessarily repeating symbols. In SCMA the multidimensional spreading codebooks are sparse and hence detection can be made simpler.